


Speak No Evil

by ProlixEllipsis



Category: Black Panther (2018)
Genre: Cousin Incest, M/M, Muteness, Pining, but it’s mentioned once so ignore it if you like, other characters appear but in minor roles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-20 11:04:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14893419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProlixEllipsis/pseuds/ProlixEllipsis
Summary: Erik wakes without a voice.  This facilitates a dialogue.





	Speak No Evil

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mahalshairyballs](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=mahalshairyballs).



At the beginning, Erik spent days at a time in voluntary isolation, shut up in one corner or another of the library, the exact location rotating on some schedule the Dora had yet to crack, emerging only to make appearances at mealtimes and the practice grounds. It was as if he’d fashioned a prison for himself to spite T’Challa’s mercy.

Though T’Challa wonders, at night, if it was a mercy.

Erik is so angry those first few months, but there are no shouts or curses. He is perfectly silent – silenced.

Except he is not.

He picks up sign languages, plural, rapidly. Only Shuri can seem to keep up, and there are many exchanges she refuses to translate, meanings T’Challa can only guess at from the fire in her eyes and the way Erik looks alive with someone to challenge.

 

He only ever seems to look himself when he is angry.

Or perhaps his anger is all T’Challa knows.

 

He likes to watch Erik’s hands, even when he can’t understand. They move like the rest of him, with intent and grace, with power and purpose, and it carries over into his handwriting. He wrote more in the first few weeks, when it was his only recourse to speak with anyone. Now, such instances seem primarily reserved for expressions of especial disdain. He’s taken to carrying pads of paper with him, had stared into T’Challa’s eyes as he refused the kimoyo beads, scrawling out in tight, narrow lettering that he wouldn’t wear a collar for their convenience before spitting at their feet. Shuri had been scandalized. It wasn’t often that her gifts, however begrudgingly given, were rebuffed.

Never mind that they _had_ included a tracker – standard issue.

As she explained, repeatedly, over the next several days, it was the principle of the thing.

 

Against advisement and his own better judgment, he’d gone with his gut and dropped the matter.

 

And for Erik’s part, despite never making any promises, despite no official sentence binding him, Erik never ran. T’Challa had been prepared to…well, he’s still not quite sure what he’d planned to do, hasn’t been sure of himself where Erik is concerned since the moment he learned he existed. But Erik has yet to leave, has yet to damage anything more than property and pride, and even that was mostly confined to those first few turbulent days when T’Challa could feel the accusations unspoken emanating from Erik’s glare every moment they shared air.

 

Okoye is sure he is planning something.

He admits, she is probably right.

 

He learns how to sign from Shuri, beginning with Erik’s names, in every language she knows. She reminds him that Erik _can_ hear him if he’d just choose to walk up and talk, but…he wants to be able to converse with Erik on equal terms.

He wants to speak with Erik as Erik speaks.

 

He dreams of the press of clawed fingers, sometimes into the palm of his hand, tracing words he treasures into his flesh, sometimes around the breadth of his throat, suffocating a scream. Either way, he wakes panting in a way that’s grown foreign to him, heart racing as if he were being chased by something capable of keeping up.

 

T’Challa finds the first note lying on the floor of his office, presumably slipped under the door sometime before sunrise because he hadn’t seen it when he left, hours after midnight. The outreach has been an arduous undertaking, a revision of a policy as old as Wakanda’s history, a sudden and unexpected swerve that many still disagree with, some more vocally than others. Of course, in his experience, it’s the ones whose gazes are bitter yet who hold their tongues that require the most watchful eye.

 

It is more a scrap of paper than a sheet, with the ragged edge that results from tearing and crumpled corners that speak of haste. T’Challa lifts it with his fingertips, holding it at arm’s length and squinting at the handwriting for longer than he’d like to admit. He discovers a terse message, enough words to provide context for the calculations and no more, correcting a minor accounting error from the day before. It is a matter of a missed decimal that would have grown into an enormous headache if spotted any later.

 

The note isn’t signed, but it’s in his cousin’s handwriting, and Erik doesn’t look at him at breakfast that day, which really speaks for itself.

 

The notes keep coming. At irregular intervals. This goes on for months.

They do not speak of it.

 

Erik sometimes delivers full dissertations under cover of night. He is more open in writing than he ever is in person. There are critiques of policy, musings on art and history, even film reviews and fashion advice. T’Challa learns Erik in silence and solitude.

The same way Erik chooses to speak.

 

Anger is a constant undercurrent, plain in the tight, dark lines of ink or graphite, imprinted so deeply into the paper that it’s a wonder the sheets aren’t peppered with holes like bullet spray. Even when Erik’s thoughts are at their most idyllic, when he slips into fond recollections of his early childhood, or goes on long tangents on the subject of a Japanese animated series about an alien abandoned on Earth who grew into a martial artist (apparently the second, and best, installment in a trilogy), he is still angry.

 

T’Challa wonders if a prison of your own making counts as a prison nonetheless.

 

Nakia says they should talk. He suspects she knows they are talking, though he hasn’t mentioned the letters to anyone. Well, Erik is talking to him. He supposes that is what she means, that he should write back.

 

It shames him slightly, but he hesitates. He doesn’t know what to say.

 

He elects for pen and paper – it feels right to respond in kind, and for a moment he feels like he’s been swept up in some courtly romance before banishing the thought from his mind. This is not a romance, not a relationship he can name. In fact, he is fairly certain it does not even qualify as a correspondence until he finally gets around to sending a reply.

 

He satisfies himself with laying out the materials. The words will come when they come.

 

It occurs to him that, as a soldier, Erik might have picked up semaphore at some point. He’s certainly aware of Morse code. T’Challa has heard him drumming insults into the table at breakfast. There is a reason, after all, that Shuri occasionally snorts milk from her nose apropos of nothing, that Mother rolls her eyes or clears her throat in the midst of otherwise mild conversation, and even more rarely, that Erik smiles at these reactions.

 

It is actually only the inkling of an expression, a faint upward twitch of the tips of his lips.

T’Challa suspects he should be worried that he apparently pays close enough attention to notice the tell, much less have committed each instance to memory. It is a slow-growing collection, but a growing one all the same, and that thought alone is enough to warm his heart and ease his mind.

 

He delays his response, but Erik doesn’t seem troubled by it. The letters keep coming, in ever more varied forms – some anecdotes from his day, some confessions from the depths of his soul. T’Challa learns the stories behind every scar.

Nakia’s looks get decidedly more pointed, and T’Challa becomes distressingly acquainted with how well her elbows can rival them.

 

When he eventually sits himself down to write, nothing comes to him. The page lays blank for hours on end until he hears a rustle at the door, a slip of paper sliding in along the floor.

He’s on his feet before his mind catches up, has the door open before he knows what to say, and meets Erik’s surprised stare with an equally befuddled one of his own, as if he hadn’t expected to find him there after practically jumping to catch him.

After a moment, Erik gives him a _look_ , but says nothing. T’Challa swallows, and his heart picks up at the way Erik’s eyes flick down his throat. The hush of the hour has a sanctity to it. He feels caught somehow and laid bare and this must be what they mean when they say he freezes because he cannot, for the life of him, force the words sitting on his heart from his throat.

 

But tonight, there is recourse.

 

He signs instead. _Would you like to come in?_

 

And Erik smiles his shadow of a smile, and T’Challa steps aside as N’Jadaka crosses the threshold, looking, for once, alive but not angry.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Killchalla Wishlist prompt: “N’Jadaka is fixed by Shuri/resurrected but something goes wrong/there’s something different with him (it doesn’t need to be personality it can be physical or something else, but no amnesia).” Submitted by mahalshairyballs. Cross-posted to Tumblr.


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